Disabled flyer alleges harassment on Mumbai-Delhi flight

New Delhi: Hardly three months after Jeeja Ghosh, a teacher who suffers from cerebral palsy, was forced off a flight at the Kolkata airport because the airline felt she was not fit to fly, another passenger with physical disability has alleged that he was manhandled by airline staff on Thursday afternoon.
Shuaib Chalklen, special rapporteur on disability with the UN's Commission for Social Development, alleged that he was manhandled and his boarding pass was marked "parallysed (sic)" on the flight from Mumbai to Delhi.
"While checking me in and collecting my boarding pass, an official asked me why I was in a wheelchair. And when I received my boarding pass, the word paralyzed had been scribbled on it," said Chalklen, who has been wheelchair-bound for 35 years.
Chalklen, who was senior policy analyst in the South African president's office from 2006 to 2007, is on a personal visit to India and was travelling on IndiGo's flight 6E 176 on Thursday. He said he repeatedly asked for an aisle wheelchair to move comfortably through the aisle to his seat - 3C. "However, the official kept saying 'OK', and when I did board my flight, I was not provided with it and carried like a sack of potatoes."
18/05/12 Prerna Sodhi/Times of India

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Categories: Indigo Airlines May 2012